The past, present and future of Work

I was at a Cognizant event last week where they introduced 21 jobs they are predicting for the next decade. Last year, they had announced their first batch of 21 jobs. See here for details. The day before, Mark Hurd went even further at Oracle OpenWorld – he projected a set of new technology-related job titles would be created and sooner – by 2025. See below for the slide he used.

Laugh at them if you want but I liked the confidence in both projections. As I told a couple of folks at the Cognizant event, it is nice to see people be optimistic about new types of work, not be gloomy that machines will largely take it over. That was the mood when I started to write Silicon Collar just 3 years ago.

But why look into crystal balls? The Bureau of Labor Statistics which keeps a very close eye on skills and titles for over 800 occupations reported many changes in its Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) in just the last 8 years

“Of the 867 occupations in the 2018 structure, 391 remained completely unchanged from the 2010 SOC, 355 had at least a definition change, 131 had at least a title change, and 115 had at least a code change.”

Work continues to evolve before our very eyes. Why are we surprised?

This year I have studied a lot of US history in the 1800s. In doing so, I kept an eye for how occupations appeared and evolved. Consumer tastes, technology impact on work, labor migrations all led to significant ebbs and flows in jobs.

If you have watched the TV show Mountain Men you may think these are modern day studs. Actually their ancestors were fighting the Beaver Wars centuries earlier and their glory days came after mapping improved with the Lewis and Clark western expedition of 1804-6. Their fortunes subsided as European demand (in particular) for fur changed and technology allowed for development of synthetic clothing materials.

If you have read Melville’s Moby Dick which was set in 1851, you wonder what happened to whaling, once a lucrative occupation. Improved refining technology and logistics brought kerosene cans to much of the country thanks to Rockefeller (Standard Oil branding was meant to assure consumers the quality was standard everywhere) and that reduced some of the demand for whale oil. Then Edison’s bulb and his and Tesla’s electric currents delivered a fatal blow to whaling. But just as important was that unlike Ishmael who found "nothing particular to interest me on shore," young workers increasingly found new occupations the Industrial Revolution was creating onshore.

I went to school at TCU in Ft. Worth and kept hearing of the Chisholm Trail. Much later in life I learned a technology - the railroad - had helped create the cowboy who did his famous cattle drives on that trail to railheads in Arkansas and Kansas. From there, the herds would be be shipped by rail to eastern markets. Just as quickly, another technology – barbed wire – affected the occupation by restricting their routes and forced cowboys to turn from nomads to settled ranchers.

These days we marvel about UPS and Fedex logistics. 150 years ago, the supply chain pioneers were Russell, Majors and Waddell. They provided wagons and supplies to countless families who trekked west. Their single most prominent innovation was the Pony Express which could deliver a letter cross-country in 10 days. That was lightning fast in 1860! But the service only lasted about a year. A new technology – the telegraph – made the service look painfully slow and unreliable.

Mark Twain would likely have never become a famous author. The Civil War interfered with a job he really enjoyed – as a steamboat pilot. His real name was Sam Clemens and his adopted moniker was a river term for 12 feet, a safe depth for boats then navigating the Mississippi.

The Civil War, horrible as it was, similarly changed the lives of millions of other young workers. It gave a generation of American males on horses and trains their first taste of wanderlust. That along with immigrants created a mobile workforce which has become a hallmark of the US economy. The war allowed young ladies to become nurses, tailors, farmers, even spies. Technology in the form of sewing machines, typewriters and telephones created millions of jobs over the next few decades for these ladies who had seen life outside their homes.

The railroad also led to all kinds of job related immigration. Chinese workers helped in the construction of the Transcontinental railroad. Scandinavian workers helped with the logging industry as the country’s population spread west. E. European workers helped create our giant wheat and other farms in the Great Plains.

I could go on. The 1800s are a fascinating study of countless occupations which were born, blossomed and transformed in the US.

Just a few generations later we would do well to remember that labor tends to be mobile and that occupations evolve all the time. We can fret about machines, push for regulation, and keep ignoring the signals the labor economy consistently sends out. We have been not paying close attention to those signals and have ended up with a job economy with millions of unfilled blue collar and trade jobs. In contrast, we have way too many white collar graduates with backbreaking student debt. Worse, our immigration has for the last few decades not been aligned with these labor market realities.

Time to go back to listening to the labor economy. It is an amazing ecosystem which supports 800+ occupations and keeps making workers smarter, speedier and safer while absorbing ever new forms of robotics, drones, wearables, sensors, AI and other automation.

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The past, present and future of Work

I was at a Cognizant event last week where they introduced 21 jobs they are predicting for the next decade. Last year, they had announced their first batch of 21 jobs. See here for details. The day before, Mark Hurd went even further at Oracle OpenWorld – he projected a set of new technology-related job titles would be created and sooner – by 2025. See below for the slide he used.

Laugh at them if you want but I liked the confidence in both projections. As I told a couple of folks at the Cognizant event, it is nice to see people be optimistic about new types of work, not be gloomy that machines will largely take it over. That was the mood when I started to write Silicon Collar just 3 years ago.

But why look into crystal balls? The Bureau of Labor Statistics which keeps a very close eye on skills and titles for over 800 occupations reported many changes in its Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) in just the last 8 years

“Of the 867 occupations in the 2018 structure, 391 remained completely unchanged from the 2010 SOC, 355 had at least a definition change, 131 had at least a title change, and 115 had at least a code change.”

Work continues to evolve before our very eyes. Why are we surprised?

This year I have studied a lot of US history in the 1800s. In doing so, I kept an eye for how occupations appeared and evolved. Consumer tastes, technology impact on work, labor migrations all led to significant ebbs and flows in jobs.

If you have watched the TV show Mountain Men you may think these are modern day studs. Actually their ancestors were fighting the Beaver Wars centuries earlier and their glory days came after mapping improved with the Lewis and Clark western expedition of 1804-6. Their fortunes subsided as European demand (in particular) for fur changed and technology allowed for development of synthetic clothing materials.

If you have read Melville’s Moby Dick which was set in 1851, you wonder what happened to whaling, once a lucrative occupation. Improved refining technology and logistics brought kerosene cans to much of the country thanks to Rockefeller (Standard Oil branding was meant to assure consumers the quality was standard everywhere) and that reduced some of the demand for whale oil. Then Edison’s bulb and his and Tesla’s electric currents delivered a fatal blow to whaling. But just as important was that unlike Ishmael who found "nothing particular to interest me on shore," young workers increasingly found new occupations the Industrial Revolution was creating onshore.

I went to school at TCU in Ft. Worth and kept hearing of the Chisholm Trail. Much later in life I learned a technology - the railroad - had helped create the cowboy who did his famous cattle drives on that trail to railheads in Arkansas and Kansas. From there, the herds would be be shipped by rail to eastern markets. Just as quickly, another technology – barbed wire – affected the occupation by restricting their routes and forced cowboys to turn from nomads to settled ranchers.

These days we marvel about UPS and Fedex logistics. 150 years ago, the supply chain pioneers were Russell, Majors and Waddell. They provided wagons and supplies to countless families who trekked west. Their single most prominent innovation was the Pony Express which could deliver a letter cross-country in 10 days. That was lightning fast in 1860! But the service only lasted about a year. A new technology – the telegraph – made the service look painfully slow and unreliable.

Mark Twain would likely have never become a famous author. The Civil War interfered with a job he really enjoyed – as a steamboat pilot. His real name was Sam Clemens and his adopted moniker was a river term for 12 feet, a safe depth for boats then navigating the Mississippi.

The Civil War, horrible as it was, similarly changed the lives of millions of other young workers. It gave a generation of American males on horses and trains their first taste of wanderlust. That along with immigrants created a mobile workforce which has become a hallmark of the US economy. The war allowed young ladies to become nurses, tailors, farmers, even spies. Technology in the form of sewing machines, typewriters and telephones created millions of jobs over the next few decades for these ladies who had seen life outside their homes.

The railroad also led to all kinds of job related immigration. Chinese workers helped in the construction of the Transcontinental railroad. Scandinavian workers helped with the logging industry as the country’s population spread west. E. European workers helped create our giant wheat and other farms in the Great Plains.

I could go on. The 1800s are a fascinating study of countless occupations which were born, blossomed and transformed in the US.

Just a few generations later we would do well to remember that labor tends to be mobile and that occupations evolve all the time. We can fret about machines, push for regulation, and keep ignoring the signals the labor economy consistently sends out. We have been not paying close attention to those signals and have ended up with a job economy with millions of unfilled blue collar and trade jobs. In contrast, we have way too many white collar graduates with backbreaking student debt. Worse, our immigration has for the last few decades not been aligned with these labor market realities.

Time to go back to listening to the labor economy. It is an amazing ecosystem which supports 800+ occupations and keeps making workers smarter, speedier and safer while absorbing ever new forms of robotics, drones, wearables, sensors, AI and other automation.